Most delightful goldenagers,

A pleasure to meet you in typing once again for this latest update.

A number of you have asked after my health, so I'll handle that first. My hand's slowly getting better. More slowly than I'd like, since the little ones generally have little respect for the commandment "thou shalt not use thine wrist", but the brace is helping. I've also acquired a smaller, if more sweat-provoking, brace that lets me type without straining my wrist. I'll see the doctor next week to get a more, ahem, expert review of the situation.

On to Our Golden Age.











Finally, a surprise late-in-the-era update to the Vastlands Guidebook!



There's a few other background things, more spot art, tables, layout ... but those aren't so pretty yet. I hope to have the whole second chapter of OGA ready for you in the next update. Fingers crossed.

Till then, if you haven't yet, be welcome at the stratometaship: https://discord.gg/gpMD4TPkPq (100-use link, check later post or message if it's out). We had cookies, but they grew legs and walked away.

Ok. Keep this short, keep this sweat.

I'll be back shortly!
—Luka

Most excellent goldenagers,

Look at this:

That’s a wrist brace.

I’d been experiencing some pain with certain motions of my left hand for some time and went to the doctor yesterday. After a physical exam he suspected a torn tendon, but after an X-ray and ultrasound, he figured out that I had torn the ligaments between my left ulna (the bone that sticks out on the outside of the arm, where it attaches to the wrist) and the triquetrum (the triangular bone on the outside of the wrist just below the ulna).

I suspect it was an old injury that got aggravated by catching and lifting small wriggling creatures over the last year. I opted for the less invasive treatment, hence the brace for the next two weeks at least. We’ll see more after the next check up.

The good news is that I’m right handed. The bad news is I usually type two-handed, not seven-fingered.

This means that for the next couple of weeks I’ll be focusing on art for the OGA book, rather than text, editing and layout. C’est la vie. I hope you enjoy the following pieces. There will be more in a couple of weeks and an update on the state of the wrist.

Now the art.

Here's some art for the book from the last week and a bit.

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As mentioned, more art in the mid-August update in a couple of weeks! Take care of yourselves and your wrists!

From a very wet Seoul,

—Luka

Good Goldenagers!

Calling in from a heat wave here in Korea. Folks saying it's going to be a heat dome. Anyway, hot hot hot.

<<Backers: you can skim to the backers only bit for PDF & high resolution links!>>

I planned to send this update a week ago, but my beloved child picked up another virus at childcare, passed it to me, and this Tuesday I went to the doctor who asked, "Oh? Has the throat infection not cleared up?"

To which I replied, "No, this is a new one."

And after an examination the doctor responded, "Oh, this isn't a throat infection, it's a sinus infection. Ten more days of antibiotics."

This is the sixth time I'm sick since March this year. Sixth time. Third time I need antibiotics for an infection. I'm honestly getting on first name terms with so many doctors, it's ridiculous.

But, enough about yellow slime!*

When I wasn't too sick, I tackled the second adventure - the Hollow House. The premise is, simply enough, that the heroes acquire a house as a base of operations and a kind of shared character. There are two parts to the adventure: 1) acquiring the house (so, the adventure bits) and 2) managing the house by the characters.

The second part I already had (but not laid out), while the first part I needed to write. So I did.











I knew the house had to be a real character after all that. Something visual to grab the players and make them want to deal with it. I also wanted it different from the Castle of Living Stone, so I took a different approach: I drew the whole thing by hand.



And here it is with labels and such.


So, the adventure part is rounded out, with a lot of places for the players to fiddle with in the vicinity of their house. But where are the rules?

Ah, yes, well, you see ... the part about being sick again. I didn't get around to fixing its layout and adjusting the text to fit the adventure. Because I wrote those rules last year, I need to go through them with a comb to make sure they fit the adventure. However, here I was, Friday fast approaching and I asked myself: do I wait until this whole chapter is perfect and I share it then ... OR ... do I do the smart thing and share the first fifteen pages right now?

So, you're reading Part One of Hollow House and Part Two comes as soon as possible. After that, I'm going to tackle the remaining four-of-six lands and get their layout spruced up ... and then we'll be able to have a mega-teaser. Something like the first 200 pages of the book all in one PDF.

Send me all your psychic immune system boosters, please, because this stuff with waking up at night for babies and chain-fighting viruses is rough.

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Right off an overheated keyboard,

—Luka R,
Seoul, Hot Summer 2025

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*
Yellow Slime
ARMOR CLASS: like jellow
MOVEMENT: very slow (ambush drop)
HIT DICE: 4+4
THAC0: 13
NO. OF ATTACKS: 1 (plop!)
DAMAGE/ATTACK: 1d10+2
SPECIAL: acid attack, wind division
SIZE: stringy net (10 spans across, 6 head-sized globules)
MORALE: fearless (11)

Wind Division: When struck by winds, breaths, blows, and sneezes, it divides into 1d4+1 smaller jellies (2 HD each).
Acid Damage: Metal gear splashed by the yellow slime suffers 1 damage per round until cleaned. If you don't feel like tracking gear life scores, just roll 1d12 for each piece of gear each round. If you roll the damage it suffered or less, it falls apart.

Good Goldenagers!

Happy Force of July, everyone.

Over the last two weeks, I've returned to the main book, Our Golden Age.

I needed to work on a piece of art to switch from editing textboxes, pushing pixels, aligning squirrels, pruning widows, and harvesting orphans, and other terrible layout tasks ... back to, well, creatin'.

Way back in 2023 or so I took a shortcut with the introductory adventure in Our Golden Age. I reused an older piece of art, the Ministry Pyramid, to stand in for the Castle ("castle") in that adventure.


The piece is perfectly fine, but ... it doesn't fit perfectly.

However, I'd put off returning to it, because I knew what it would involve. It would involve days and days of drawing, simply because making a piece of this sort takes a long time.

Well, I pulled up the Our Golden Age file and reviewed it, checked what needs to be done (a bit of writing, a lot of layout and editing) ... and then stopped on this piece again.

Fine, here goes I thought to myself.



I exported a nice big 600 dpi spread, tossed it into procreate and sketched out what I had in mind. Along with space for the middle of the spread in the middle.

I thought I'd take 2–3 days on this piece ...



In the event, the full piece took me about 9 days of drawing to finish. Drawing these kind of wimmelbilds takes a long time, more so if I'm working digitally, and I can only draw for so long at a stretch before my body and brain give up. Now, once upon a time, I would pick up and draw more in the evening ... but these days those are claimed by others.

A couple of times I felt like a complete fool. Why. Why had I done this to myself?

But then I also thought ... well ... this adventure deserves to have a nice piece. It's set up as a skeleton adventure framework that introduces the setting and invites the referee and the players to invent together. It needs a piece of art to tether things together ... that's why.

At least that's what I said to myself.



I've also attached the Castle of Living Stone in full resolution for you to enjoy (see attachments).

I also decided to redo the introduction page from a dry "what this book is about" spread to something that takes proper advantage of the Face of the MKR:



And relegates the introduction to the next page ... so you get to imagine the kinds of adventures you'll run and how the book looks before ... y'know ... I blather about what the book is about.

Anyhow, now that the seal on the second book is cracked and painted over, it's time to tackle that. The next update will either be ... one more of the introductory adventures or the laid out six lands core of the book. One or the other.

Now I have to hurry up and hit send on this update.

Take care, and enjoy your July weather.

—Luka,
Seoul